Semantica

Filmmakers Jemma Foster and Camilla French explore the technoetic arts and the awakening and integration of archaic wisdom through the beyond-human.

Semantica is the film studio of Wild Alchemy Lab working directly with the natural world, collaborating with biodata musicians, academics, scientists, researchers and communities pursuing a new paradigm in a future that expresses itself through non-hierarchical, symbiotic, co-creation.

Oral storytelling and myth document the relationship between human and non-human, the unseen and seen realms, providing a framework for navigating interspecies relations.

At the synthesis of nature and technology, digital platforms and innovations placing plants as ancestral guides and non-human intelligence as a medium can provide the framework for regenerative evolution of the planet.

Semantica is an XR installation which explores non-linear linguistics in the post-anthropocene, autopoiesis and the biological and mystical architectures of creation. Four analogue TV screens play four combined films on a loop, each starting where the other ends, showcasing the resonance between the films as part of a story which takes place outside of time and space. Each film is inspired by one of the key elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water and a unique soundscape created from biofrequencies provide a lens through which to explore the complex and fragile relationship between humans and more-than-humans. The score for the films is the result of collaborating with musicians (Oli Bayston, Imka, Jamie Perera) to transform the raw biodata (recordings of plant frequencies), along with the sonification of data and ambient field recordings.

In the Initiation Hall of the Telesterion, fragments of a fractured past are held within the last remaining plant of alien hybrid origins that revealed itself on the planet to guide human evolution. No plant has bloomed in a decade after plant cells were used for data storage, leading to genetic corruption. DNA fragments from a pioneer plant, obscured from human consciousness due to biohacking now appears in people's dreams. A holographic projection formed from its DNA has been programmed to communicate with the audience, who can input written questions to the plant with the answers appearing on small digital screens.

The Enkoimeterion dream incubation chamber. Audience invitation to social dreaming in communion with this hybrid plant that exists in the collective unconscious to alter human consciousness and seed a new reality. A guided meditative practice alters the collective resonant state of the audience. This collected data, measured by ambient biodata devices in the space, is mixed with the text prompts from the hybrid plant in the previous room and transforms and alters the visuals being projected in real time onto the walls of the space.